Roma finds writer-director Alfonso Cuarón in complete, enthralling
command of his visual craft - and telling the most powerfully personal story of
his career. --Rotton Tomatoes

It is the clarity of Cuarón's eye, and the sea-like sway
of his remembrance, that compel you to trust the tale he tells.
-- Anthony Lane, New Yorker

In “Roma,”
the Mexican director Alfonso
Cuarón uses a large canvas to tell the story of lives that some
might think small. A personal epic set in Mexico City in the
early 1970s, it centers on a young indigenous woman who works as a maid for a
middle-class white family that’s falling apart.

Cuarón
uses one household on one street to open up a world, working on a panoramic
scale often reserved for war stories, but with the sensibility of a personal
diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent
forces, and a masterpiece.

Few directors tell large-scale stories with as
much sensitivity as Cuarón,
whose filmmaking style has grown more exhilarating as the expressive realism of
his breakout movie, “Y Tu Mamá
También,” has been channeled into the restrained ostentation of
his fantasies “Children
of Men” and “Gravity.”

In “Roma”
he has further refined his style by marshaling various narrative strategies,
including cinematic spectacle. Many directors use spectacle to convey
larger-than-life events while reserving devices like close-ups to express a
character’s inner being. Here, Cuarón
uses both intimacy and monumentality to express the depths of ordinary
life.

“Roma”
shares its name with a neighborhood in Mexico City where
families live behind locked gates, and where maids, cooks and drivers busily
keep homes running. In one such house, Cleo (the
newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) lives
with and works for a multigenerational brood that scarcely seems capable of
doing anything without her. In the morning, she wakes the children; at night,
she puts them to bed. From each dawn and until long after dusk, she tends to the
family and its sprawling two-story house. She serves meals, cleans away dog
droppings and carries laundry up to the roof, where she does the wash in view of
other maids on other roofs with their own heavy loads.

The climactic family road trip in Alfonso
Cuarón’s “Roma,”
which stars Yalitza Aparicio, center, as a middle-class Mexico City family’s
maid.CreditCreditCarlos Somonte/Netflix

The movie opens in 1970 with scenes that establish Cleo’s
everyday routine and, by extension, the parameters of her life. Much of the
movie takes place inside the house (a re-creation of Cuarón’s childhood home),
which is flanked by a gated, open-roofed passage filled with bicycles, plants,
caged birds and an exuberant, underloved dog named Borras. Cleo
and her friend Adela (Nancy
García), the family cook, live at the end of the corridor in a
tiny, cramped upstairs room. The women are from the same village in the southern
state of Oaxaca and fluidly slip between Spanish and Mixtec,
their native tongue, as they share gossip and sober news from home.

A series of catastrophes slowly upends the stability of this world, starting
with a business trip the father takes that proves calamitous. There’s also an
earthquake, a shattered window, an unexpected pregnancy, death and betrayal. In
one of the most astonishing sequences, Cleo and the family’s
grandmother, Señora Teresa (Verónica García), watch a student demonstration
turn into a police riot through the window of a furniture showroom. Cuarón
doesn’t identify the incident — known as the Corpus Christi Massacre of
1971 — but fills in that day with visceral, harrowing flashes of
chaotic violence, including a pietà-like image of a woman crying for help while
cradling a dying man.

Cuarónserved as the director of photography for “Roma,”
and his work here is astonishing. He shot the movie in
black-and-white, large-format digital, creating images that have extraordinary
clarity, detail and tonality, with entire rainbows of gray, black and
white. Like Cleo, the camera is often mobile,
anticipating and following her movements like a faithful companion. Cuarónis conversant in Hollywood storytelling but here he also
makes expressive use of the kind of tableau staging — arranging people in the
frame — that is more familiar from art cinema. By letting a scene play out
without much editing, he lets us see how each of these characters inhabits these
specific spaces.

Although “Roma”
is autobiographical, Cuarón
doesn’t explicitly announce it as such. The family’s four children — a girl and
three boys, one presumably based on the director — tend to blur into a
cacophonous, charming little mob and you catch their names only in passing. The
father (Fernando Grediaga) first
appears onscreen in a series of cubistic close-ups — a pack of cigarettes and a
lighter, two hands casually holding a car wheel — that suggest he isn’t wholly
present or knowable. The lumbering Ford Galaxy that he meticulously coaxes into
the narrow corridor, inching forward and back, a car mirror nearly brushing a
wall, suggests his isolation from a family that he soon abandons.

From left, Yalitza Aparicio, Diego Cortina
Autrey and Marina De Tavira in a scene from “Roma.”CreditCarlos
Somonte/NetflixImage

The mother, Sofía
(Marina De Tavira), is more present, though still less so than
Cleo, the children’s surrogate parent. Sofía is unfairly
berated by her husband and she, in turn, rebukes Cleo, a chain
of exploitation that Cuarón
represents coolly, occasionally letting a camera movement — a pan of the
immaculate house — comment for him. “Roma”
doesn’t have a strong story; there are no inciting incidents or mysteries to
solve. Instead, in scene after scene, Cuarón
creates a fine-grained vision of a woman and a world shaped by a colonialist
past that inexorably weighs down the present, most conspicuously in a surreal
interlude filled with guns, servants and a conflagration.

Cuarón’s
authorial voice becomes progressively more conspicuous through his visual
choices, his staging and camerawork. Much happens, but in fragments that slide
together as the family and larger sociopolitical forces come into focus. In an
early meal scene, one of the boys casually mentions seeing a soldier fatally
shoot a kid who was throwing water balloons at an army jeep. He begins speaking
over a close-up of Cleo’s hands as she prepares a plate of
food, an image that makes the brutality feel quotidian. In another scene, Cuarón
punctuates a shot of the parents and children watching TV with one of
Cleo seated next to them on the floor, a child’s arm draped on
her body.

Cuarón
wrote as well as edited “Roma”;
he folds just enough exposition into ordinary-sounding conversations to keep you
tethered and doesn’t step on the story by overcutting it. You don’t necessarily
know who the children in lederhosen are in one sequence, but their outfits,
casual wealth and taxidermy menagerie could fill volumes. Mostly, he speaks
through his visuals, particularly the camerawork that alternately articulates
his and Cleo’s points of view. You see what she sees and also
view her from a distance, but at times — as in a scene in which she wades into
violently crashing waves, the camera steadily moving parallel with her — the
movie seems to embody her being.

This is a stunning sequence that’s viscerally terrifying and emotionally
overwhelming. Yet it also invokes the oceanic feeling of a being at one with the
universe that dovetails with a climactic family road trip. You feel both Cuarón’s
presence and Cleo’s in this vision of her determinedly pushing
against the threatening waves, an image he has dredged from the past and made
alive through memory.

“Roma”
is dedicated to Liboria Rodríguez (“for
Libo”), the woman who raised him in a house like the one in this movie, where
every so often you can see a jet passing overhead, a vision that points to a
distant, peripatetic future, even as it suggests that Cuarón never left this
place, its women and its love.